Robert S. Koss, Ph.D.

Senior Trainer, Mentor and Consultant

Robert Koss is a Senior Trainer, Mentor and Consultant with Object Mentor. He spends half his time teaching courses, half his time writing and revising course materials, half his time consulting on client projects and half his time keeping up with the industry.

Robert is fluent in C++, C# and Java. He is also a self-professed Agile/XP zealot. He has seen too many clients spend "way too much time drawing UML pictures or writing use cases and never verifying any model with an executable program". His current mission in life is to get clients into code just as soon as possible and to learn to use code as a probe into analysis and design, while still managing to deliver value to their business.

Lately, he has taken an interest in dynamically-typed languages and is learning Smalltalk and Python.

Work Experience

Object Mentor Incorporated, 1999-presentSenior Trainer, Mentor and Consultant
Provide training and mentoring in Object Oriented Design Principles, Design Patterns, Extreme Programming, C++, C# and Java. Provided mentoring on a Java/RMI project, helped transition a group towards an iterative-incremental development process. Deliverables included spike solution GUI prototype using Swing to control remote hardware Developed user interface in Java for a document imaging and decision support system using Swing with underlying finite state machine architecture for improved maintainability.

Alkon Corporation, 1987-1989Senior Software Engineer
Made many major enhancements to the company's real-time, process control software to control the operation of batching plants. Product was written in C and ran under QNX, a real-time, multitasking OS.

Robert Koss Consulting, 1986 - 1999
Software Consultant

Taught Object-Oriented Analysis/Design, Design Patterns, C++, and Java classes to over 1,000 attendees at numerous companies throughout the world. Made significant contributions to course content to make the material more easily understood and to keep the topics current in this rapidly developing field. Provided mentoring during the analysis and design of a CAD system for the clothing-design industry. Led a group of talented C programmers through the development of use cases and object models, leading to a robust and well documented design which is being implemented in C++. Made heavy use of design patterns and state machines. Led the development team for several Microsoft Windows applications to allow a major pharmaceutical company to gain rapid government approval to market new drugs. Used OWL/C++. Worked on several systems at the device driver level to allow interfacing to hardware. Work was done in C, C++, and assembly language as needed.

Ohio State University — Department of Physics, 1983-1986Research Associate
Designed software for large-scale computation of transport coefficients in granular composite materials. Work was done in Fortran.